Excerpt: 'The Best Seat in the House'

May 18, 2006

Page 12 of 13

I went to sleep thinking of baseball, and I woke up thinking of
baseball. I memorized the numbers that mattered: Babe Ruth's
714 home runs, Joe DiMaggio's fifty-six-game hitting streak.
"That's the only record that won't fall in baseball," Dad said of
DiMaggio's feat. "No one will ever do that again."
Dad maintained a reverence for the record, but not for the
team for which DiMaggio played. When I told Dad that I felt
sorry for the New York Yankees because they had had a few
poor seasons in the late 1960s, Dad did not suppress the urge to
give me another baseball history lesson, right then and there:
"Don't ever feel sorry for the New York Yankees!"

I became absurdly superstitious watching games of the teams I
liked, often refusing to get up from a chair for as long as an hour
if things were going well. If I crossed my legs and the Tigers hit a
home run, my legs stayed crossed. Kate and Jim and even Amy,
who was just a little girl, were in on this too, helping in their
own way, in their own seats. During the 1972 American League
play-offs, the Tigers faced Oakland and things weren't going
well as the A's were headed to the first of their three consecutive
world championships. I told my siblings I was going to stand on
the stone hearth of our fireplace to see if that helped.

The Tigers scored. So on the hearth I stayed. For the next two
innings, I couldn't move, hoping more Detroit runs would come.
They didn't, the Tigers lost, and I finally stepped down onto the
carpet.

There was one other way we connected to baseball back
then -- by buying, collecting, and trading baseball cards. Topps
baseball cards were stacked by the cash register at Ace Drug on
Bancroft Street, packaged with a hard stick of pink bubble gum,
and available for a nickel a pack. Trading these cards was a very
serious matter. Our philosophy was to unload any doubles we
accumulated; sometimes we even ended up with three of a kind
and really had to wheel and deal with siblings and friends. Kate
joined in and accumulated so many Larry Dierkers over the
course of one summer -- she must have had a half dozen cards
featuring the Houston Astros pitcher -- that she shrieked in delight
when she one day opened a pack and found it Dierker-less.
A prized possession became a misprinted Jim Bunning card that
read "Im Bunning." For a few days, until I showed the card to
Dad, we thought his name really might be Im.

Baseball cards were the currency of our sports passion, but
after a few years, we were not content to simply covet, trade,
and hoard them. We started to send them away to be autographed.
I sent cards to two dozen players, including Brooks
Robinson, Hank Aaron, Ferguson Jenkins, Johnny Bench, Harmon
Killebrew, Bob Gibson, and even Ted Williams when he
was managing the Washington Senators in 1969. Each one came
back autographed, some in envelopes that I swore were addressed
by the player himself.